Mistaken Lull, Simple Errand, Death in Gaza

Palestinians gathered on Friday around the body of a man identified as Ashraf Ouaida in Gaza City.Credit
Wissam Nassar for The New York Times

JABALIYA, Gaza Strip — The Abu Wardah family woke up on Friday morning to word that a hudna — Arabic for cease-fire — had been declared during the three-hour visit of the Egyptian prime minister to this embattled territory.

So, after two days of huddling indoors to avoid intensifying Israeli air assaults, Abed Abu Wardah, the patriarch, went to the market to buy fruits and vegetables. His 22-year-old son, Aiman, took an empty blue canister to be refilled with cooking gas. The younger children of their neighborhood, Annazla, in this town north of Gaza City went out to the dirt alley to kick a soccer ball.

But around 9:45 a.m., family members and neighbors said, an explosion struck a doorway near the Abu Wardah home, killing Aiman Abu Wardah as he returned from his errand, as well as Mahmoud Sadallah, 4, who lived next door and had refused his older cousin’s pleas to stay indoors.

“What is the truce? What does it mean?” the 22-year-old’s brother Mohammed, 27, asked as he mourned a few hours later.

It is unclear who was responsible for the strike on Annazla: the damage was nowhere near severe enough to have come from an Israeli F-16, raising the possibility that an errant missile fired by Palestinian militants was responsible for the deaths. What seems clear is that expectations for a pause in the fighting, for at least one family, were tragically misplaced.

Scores of rockets were fired from Gaza toward cities in southern Israel during the visit of Prime Minister Hesham Qandil of Egypt, causing panic and shattering hopes that the Egyptian leader might broker a longer-term cease-fire. The Israeli military said it suspended airstrikes during the visit, though at least two of the familiar booms of F-16 bombardments were heard in Gaza City around 9 a.m.

The failed cease-fire began a day of highs and lows across Gaza, where the largely impoverished population of 1.5 million people has become somewhat inured to violence after years of battle with Israel, and where resistance is an honored part of the culture.

Ismail Haniya, the prime minister of the militant Hamas faction, which won elections in 2006 and took full control of the strip in 2007, appeared in public for the first time since the hostilities began to welcome his Egyptian counterpart, Mr. Qandil. Because of the support of Egypt’s new Islamist leadership, Mr. Haniya said, “The time in which the Israeli occupation does whatever it wants in Gaza is gone.”

A few hours later, the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, issued a statement claiming that it had downed an Israeli warplane. An Israeli spokesman called the claim “absolutely false,” but it nonetheless led to extra-exuberant shouts of “God is great” through mosque loudspeakers as people gathered for sunset prayers.

More people roamed the streets of Gaza City and other northern areas of the strip on Friday afternoon than had on Thursday, shopping or just sitting on stoops, perhaps because it was the Islamic holy day. But by nightfall, airstrikes and rocket fire seemed to have picked up again, as news alerts announced that Israel was making final preparations for a ground invasion. The Israeli military sent text messages in Arabic to all Gaza cellphones warning that “the second phase is near.”

“They must stop,” said Saed Shabat, 42, whose home in the border town of Beit Hanoun was damaged Thursday in an F-16 strike that he said killed two people and injured 15. He was speaking of both the Israeli assault and Hamas’s barrage. “What was the use that we got from the rockets?” asked Mr. Shabat, who worked in Israel before it withdrew from Gaza in 2005. “What is the advantage we got from Hamas? We lost our work.”

There was also a gruesome reminder of the internecine tensions in Gaza over Israel. Shortly before noon, masked gunmen from the Qassam Brigades killed a man in a public square whom they accused of collaborating with Israel, witnesses said.

The man, identified as Ashraf Ouaida, lay dead for about half an hour in a traffic circle beneath a billboard showing a Hamas fighter holding a rocket, as more than 100 men and boys, some still carrying mats from Friday Prayer, crowded around. At first, his bloodied head was covered with a poster in which the Qassam Brigades took responsibility for the killing and blamed Mr. Ouaida for the deaths of 15 Palestinian leaders. Later, it was covered with a dirty plastic sheet.

Wael Mohammed, a taxi driver, was standing at the steps of the Aman Mosque when he saw two masked men drag Mr. Ouaida from a vehicle.

“They took him out from the Jeep with his hands cuffed behind his back, they pushed him under the poster and fired three gunshots at his head from the back,” Mr. Mohammed said.

Here in Jabaliya, scores of men gathered in a tent across the street from where the explosion occurred to mourn the two who died, as Aiman Abu Wardah’s mother, Saimah, wept on the floor of the foyer in the family’s home. “Aiman, Aiman,” she wailed, as the youngest of her six children, Nancy, 9, sat by her side.

Out in the alley, a bloody shirt remained where he had fallen. The house of Mahmoud, the 4-year-old, across the way was filled with glass and concrete debris from the blast, its front window gone and the walls of the salon behind pockmarked with holes. Fares Sadallah, Mahmoud’s 11-year-old cousin, said he twice tried to get the boy to come inside, to no avail. “I was afraid because there was shelling,” said Fares, whose leg bore a bandage over a shrapnel wound. “I was afraid rockets might fall.”

A few miles away, at Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Mr. Qandil and Mr. Haniya held the body of Mohammed Yasser, a child less than a year old who was one of nine children who the Hamas Health Ministry said had been killed since the fighting began Wednesday. The total number of Palestinian deaths rose to 28 on Friday, not including the collaborator, about half of them civilians, health officials said.

“This is the blood of our children on our clothes,” Mr. Haniya said as he showed the spatters to photojournalists. “This is the Egyptian and the Palestinian blood united together.”

Al Shifa, the largest hospital in Gaza, has become a gathering place this week for Palestinians who see it as both a haven and a place to show solidarity with the roughly 230 people who health officials say have been wounded.

In a ward upstairs lay Haitham Jarade, 21, who had suffered severe injuries to his face and chest on Wednesday. “In the beginning it was serious; he stayed in intensive care for 24 hours,” said his doctor, Abed Zunien. “Now he’s O.K. He’s stable.”

In the next bed, Abdullah Abu Amsha rubbed the chest of his 2-year-old son, Mohammed, who had a bandage covering his skull fracture, caused by debris from shelling on Wednesday night in Beit Hanoun.

“What was his fault? What was his guilt?” asked Mr. Abu Amsha, who said he had stayed by his son’s side since the episode, barely sleeping. “Who can sleep with the bombing and the shelling? The Israeli Army must be punished for this.”

The prime ministers departed to visit families of those who had died. Soon after their motorcade left the circular driveway in front of the hospital, another ambulance arrived to take its place.

A version of this article appears in print on November 17, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Mistaken Lull, Simple Errand, Death in Gaza. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe